Manzanera onstage with his longtime collaborator Andy Mackay, who is also his creative partner on their new album, AM.PM.
AM.PM, the intriguing all-instrumental release from legendary guitarist/producer Phil Manzanera and equally legendary saxophonist Andy Mackay, is full of unexpected twists and turns. “Somebody said to me recently, ‘I can tell you what it’s not. But I cannot tell you what the hell it is,’” says Manzanera. “And I quite agree. I listened to it and I’ve got no idea what’s coming next. I played the backing tracks once and I could never play it again. I’ve got the chord progressions…. Where did they come from? Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift. There’s a visual aspect to it, to where you’re listening to it. It’s a wonderful, very different experience.”
Manzanera and Mackay have a telepathic working relationship, which shouldn’t be surprising, given they’ve made music together for over half a century. They first connected in 1971 as part of art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, alongside singer/songwriter Bryan Ferry, synth player Brian Eno, bassist Graham Simpson, and drummer Paul Thompson. Roxy Music went on to influence the sound of popular styles that later emerged, like new wave and glam rock. While the band members went their separate ways in 1983, Manzanera and Mackay worked together in various projects, including the Explorers, who were active in the late ’80s.
Mackay also played on Manzanera’s influential solo debut Diamondhead. And in addition to his solo career, Manzanera went on to perform with prog-rock cult heroes 801, has done session work, and, in 2006, began a collaboration with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, producing the latter’s solo album On an Island and playing onstage with Gilmour for several years, being a part of the Live in Gdańsk concert recording. Roxy Music reunited in 2001 and have toured sporadically since. On March 29, 2019, Roxy Music was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, only a few months later the Covid pandemic set in, paving the way for AM.PM.
Manzanera Mackay - "Blue Skies"
“During lockdown, everybody was sort of stuck at home, and most musicians, artists, and photographers were wondering ‘What the hell can we do?’” says Manzanera. “So I was in my garden shed thinking, ‘I need to do music to get through all this.’ I reached out to Tim Finn, the singer from Crowded House and Split Enz, and we started writing songs—loads of songs. And then halfway through, I thought, ‘You know what, I’d like to do something crazy. Nothing to do with songs and structures and stuff like that. I’ll ring up Andy, I’m sure he’s not doing anything [laughs]. I’ll tell him, ‘Get off your ass, we’re going to do some music, and it’s gonna be crazy music. I’m just going to do random stuff, send it to you, and you do random stuff, then send it back to me. We’ll just have no rules, no structure.’”
Music by Painting
With a nebulous concept guided by a “no rules” approach, AM.PM slowly developed over the course of two years. A diverse cast of musicians—Anna Phoebe on violin, Seth Scott on flute, George Goode on tuba, Paul Thompson on drums, Yazz Ahmed on flugelhorn, and Mike Boddy on bass/programming/keyboards—was recruited. They did their parts remotely, sending tracks via email. Manzanera would select and layer bits and pieces into Logic, improvise to it, and then send the updated files to Mackay for his input.
“Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift.”
“It’s like a sort of call and response, but via Zoom, email, or phone. It was a good starting point for me on some of the songs—the ones with the violin, tuba, flute, and the flugelhorn,” says Manzanera. “Those were methods of initiating a track by saying, ‘You just improvise whatever you feel comfortable and I will then make a track out of it.’ I didn’t want anything particularly complicated. What I wanted from them was the beauty of their instrument, the tone of their instrument. And then I wanted to hear that set against the beauty of Andy’s sax tone or combinations of my guitar against a bit of tuba or French horn. It was a series of experiments. I thought, ‘Well, I haven’t heard this before with me, or with me and Andy, so let’s have a go and see what happens.’”
To get what he envisioned out of the musicians, at times Manzanera had to push them far beyond their comfort zones. Classical musicians are among the most highly capable of instrumentalists, and can often read even the most ink-filled pages of music with ease. But if you ask them to improvise, that skill set is sometimes out of their wheelhouse and they’ll freeze up. “I asked the guy who played some tuba to come and play a little bit at the end of one Finn/Manzanera song, and he’d done that. But he played the part very rigidly. Not ‘rigid,’ but you know, the way it was meant to be played,” recalls Manzanera. “And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, can you now just improvise for one minute. Do whatever you like. Just play whatever you like, I will make a track out of whatever you play.’ Obviously, most classically trained musicians do not like to do that because they like to see dots.”
Phil Manzanera's Gear
Phil Manzanera plays his beloved Gibson Firebird VII onstage with Roxy Music in 2022.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Guitars
- 1964 Gibson Firebird VII
- 2001 Gibson Black Les Paul Custom
- 2001 Gibson Les Paul Custom Gecko
- 1983 Fernandes Strat
- 1951 Fender Telecaster
- Gibson Les Paul Studio
- Fender Strat
Amps
- Two Cornell Voyager 20 heads (main and spare)
- Fender Blues Junior (for solos, with an SM57)
- Universal Audio OX Top Box (stereo return configuration, adding room and ribbon mic modeling on a Fender Bassman)
- Grossman FATBOX isolation cabinet (with a Celestion G12M, with an SM57)
Effects
- Two GigRig G3 controllers
- Two TX RX boxes
- JAM Pedals RetroVibe
- JAM Pedals Harmonious Monk
- JAM Pedals Wahcko
- JAM Pedals Fuzz Phrase
- Fulltone OCD
- TC Electronic Polytune
- Eventide H9
- Strymon TimeLine
- Catalinbread Topanga
- DigiTech Whammy
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Super Slinky (.009–.042)
- Dunlop Custom Roxy Music Tortex Standard
- Vovox Sonorus Cable
The tracks on AM.PM aren’t beholden to traditional concepts of form, like intro, verse, and chorus. Rather, everything just evolved organically. “You give into the structure that exists there,” explains Manzanera. “You look at it—and you can, because if you work on Logic on a computer, quite frankly, you can have a visual view of the thing. You can color up certain sections. You can say, ‘When it goes into the purple, I’m going to play whatever, and when it goes into blue, I’m gonna just go like this.’ So it’s not painting by numbers. It’s music by painting.”
“I tried to send my Firebird to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license.”
Manzanera’s primary brush was the trusty red Firebird VII that’s been his main guitar for decades. “It’s been my signature guitar, if you like, since I bought it secondhand from an American guy in London in 1973,” he says. “His parents had bought it for him from the factory in Kalamazoo, in cardinal red, which was a custom color. It was the color of a Ford Galaxie ’60s car, because Ray Dietrich, the guy who designed the Firebird, used to design cars. Gibson hired him because he was a car designer and they wanted to compete with Fender. He came up with the Firebird, but obviously it wasn’t as successful. But I loved it because it was red. The pickups are pretty unique because you’re not allowed to use that kind of metal—god knows what’s in it, it’s probably killing me or something. The wood you’re probably not allowed to use. In fact, I tried to send it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license [laughs]. It’s banned! I don’t know what kind of wood it is because it’s been painted red on top. I said, ‘It was made in America. What do you mean I can’t send it back to America?’”
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game.
Partners in Crime
The back-and-forth between Manzanera and Mackay was relatively frictionless— without many, if any, disagreements. “We’re like mindless people,” jokes Manzanera. “The thing is that we have played together on and off for 50 years. I like what he does. He likes what I do. I find the spaces around him, he finds the spaces around me. It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here. We’ve made lots of music, we’re just trying to do something beautiful that satisfies us. We’re simple players. We’re not jazzers; it’s not about technique.”
AM.PM was still a work in progress when the Roxy Music 50th Year Celebration tour suddenly popped up in 2022. Manzanera and Mackay got detoured from AM.PM and had to divert their attention to bringing their chops back up to speed for the shows. Manzanera says, “Me and Andy spent ages practicing. So at the end of the tour, I thought, ‘Why don’t we just go into the studio straightaway and finish off that instrumental album now that our chops are really sort of up to speed.’ So me, Andy, and Paul went in for just three or four days and finished the album off, capturing that moment in time. It was trying to incorporate stuff that maybe had been played by humans and by machines, but then coming back and putting humans on top of it again. Of course, now I haven’t played since we finished it, and I’m rubbish again [laughs].”
“It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here.”
Beauty in Simplicity
Most instrumental albums released by guitarists will bludgeon you over the head with nonstop 6-string in every nook and cranny. But Manzanera’s never been about guitar pyrotechnics. And his “technical limitations” turned out to be a blessing, in a way, because it led him to explore a more probing and introspective guitar style. “The great thing is that I wouldn’t have played anything more [on AM.PM], because my technique is limited. And I wanted it to be limited because I wanted to enjoy playing music for the whole of my life. I didn’t want to learn everything. And quite frankly, I haven’t learned a lot,” says Manzanera, laughing. “I tell my younger self to ‘Put your batteries in, mate,’ because you should have actually learned a bit more technique.”
While Manzanera loves hearing other people play virtuosic guitar, that’s not the path he chose. “I just want to place notes and hear musical sounds,” he says. “This might be sacrilege to a lot of people, but scales are sort of a dangerous road to go down. I know you’re meant to do it. But I don’t do it. And you know, Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave because he is incredibly good technically, and when I hear him play, I think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
In the early days of Roxy Music, Manzanera mixes it up with Bryan Ferry—and a goldtop Gibson Les Paul.Photo by Ebet Roberts
Expect the Unexpected
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game. “When Boddy was mixing it, there was this really annoying sound from the drain pipe outside so he recorded it and added it into the track,” says Manzanera. “So I said, ‘Let’s call it ‘Music for French Horn and Drain Pipe.’” That track was later released as an additional album track along with “Lady of the Lake,” an adaptation of a Schubert classical piece.
During the late ’60s, prior to Roxy Music, Manzanera had dipped his toes heavily into improvised music, and that forward-thinking approach permeates AM.PM. “What’s sort of interesting is if you’re working individually like this and you’re not all in the room playing, you haven’t got that possibility like, say, the great Miles Davis with his fantastic quintet. Where you’ve got five incredible musicians and they are sort of improvising, and calling and responding to each other,” says Manzanera. “But because I loved all that kind of music and the whole influence of improvisational stuff in the ’60s, I’m comfortable with that. I embrace that kind of thing. So, when I’m not having to work within song structures, this is the nearest I get to being in that kind of Miles Davis free world.”
“Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave…. But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
“Blue Skies,” the album opener, and tracks like “Ambiente,” immediately strike a nerve with some jazzy, jagged dissonances not dissimilar to what you’d hear in Davis’ music. But Manzanera hears things differently. “You know, dissonance is not necessarily dissonance to me,” he explains. “After all a lot of the music making is a series of choices. ‘Do I do this? Or do I do that? Okay, if I do that, what do I do next? And then, is that it? Do I stop there?’ And all those choices come from your musical DNA—all this music that you’ve listened to. In my musical DNA, I’ve got Captain Beefheart, I’ve got avant-garde jazz. And obviously, mine is different to Andy’s and it’s different to Paul’s. So it’s the way people interact together sometimes. Even though they might play simple things, it adds up to something more than just one person’s idea.”
Full Circle
Having achieved legendary status, at this point, Manzanera can make music without worrying about having to cater to corporate overlords. “It means, I’m able to put out albums like AM.PM,” he says. “It’s all cottage industry, we don’t have multi-nationals with us. We’re free and that makes me happy. The whole point of being a musician was to be free, not to be told what to do by some global company. It’s the hippie thing, I guess from way back in the ’60s. We got brainwashed by that [laughs]. ‘Hey man, I just want to be free.’”
Manzanera’s Failed Audition … for Roxy Music!
Brian Eno was already an established figure in Britain’s avant-garde music scene when he decided to begin writing pop music and form a rock band. He had already found singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry and saxophonist Andy Mackay, and they had been working on demos for about nine months when they put an ad in Melody Maker, a now-defunct music magazine, looking for a guitar player and a drummer. Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson, answered the ad. However, Manzanera failed the audition.
“I had a terrible cold that day, but actually, we got on really well, and I thought these guys are really special and different,” recalls Manzanera. “But they were kind of looking for someone with a famous name to help launch the band. They got a guy called David O’List, who had been in a band called the Nice—who toured in America already. They were on the famous tour with Jimi Hendrix and stuff, and early Pink Floyd—and they thought, ‘Right, actually we need to go with the name.’”
While disappointed, Manzanera didn’t really argue with that decision. “When I heard he got the gig, I thought, ‘Well, fair play, because he’s great.’ I saw him play at the Albert Hall with the Nice. This guy’s really good,” reflects Manzanera. As time went on, fate slowly intervened. “Things [with O’List] didn’t work out because, I think, on the first tour that he did in the States, he’d been spiked with some acid so he was just like ‘away with the fairies.’ And they couldn’t cope with his not turning up on time and things like that.”
When Roxy Music brought Manzanera back into their world, it was somewhat on the sly. “They said, ‘Oh, do you want to come and mix the sound?’ And I said, ‘I’ve got no idea how to mix the sound.’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, Eno will teach you.’” And when Manzanera turned up to the rehearsal room, mysteriously, there was a guitar lying around, and they asked him to play. It was, in effect, a secret audition.
“That was a good idea,” says Manzanera. “I probably would have been nervous. But then, you know, I joined, and then a week later, we signed the first contract. And a month later, we were recording the first album, six months later it was number four in the charts. So I was just in the right place at the right time. You know, lucky them because they could have not had me [laughs]. You gotta laugh really. It’s fate.”YouTube It
Phil Manzanera is a proponent of the “less is more” approach. Throughout AM.PM, the guitar is used as only one piece of a bigger compositional puzzle. In the haunting “Newanna”—written around violinist Anne Phoebe—the guitar is used very sparingly in the opening section, mostly to add to the mysterious vibe. After a long and simmering buildup, 6-string finally features more prominently, with Manzanera’s bending phrases starting around 3:42—more than halfway through the track. Yet here he still plays minimally and tastefully, displaying great maturity and patience.
The Warm Bender dishes these sounds with ease and savage aplomb. Outwardly, it honors the original MkII—a good way to go given that the original Sola Sound unit is one the most stylish effects ever built. But the 3-transistor NOS 75 MkII is only one of the Warm Bender’s personalities. You can also switch to a 2-transistor NOS 76 circuit, aka the Tone Bender MkI. There’s also a silicon 3-transistor Tone Bender circuit, a twist explored by several modern boutique builders. Each of these three voices can be altered further by the crown-mounted sag switch, which starves the circuit of voltage, reducing power from 9 to 6 volts. From these three circuits, the Warm Bender conjures voices that are smooth, responsive, ragged, mean, mangled, clear, and positively fried.
The Compact Wedge Edge
Warm Audio, quite wisely, did not put the Warm Bender in an authentically, full-size Tone Bender enclosure, which would gobble a lot of floor space. But this smaller, approximately 2/3-scale version, complete with a Hammerite finish, looks nearly as hip. It’s sturdy, too. The footswitch and jacks are affixed directly to the substantial enclosure entirely apart from the independently mounted through-hole circuit board, which, for containing three circuits rather than one, is larger and more densely populated than the matchbox-sized circuit boards in a ’60s Tone Bender. Despite the more cramped quarters, there’s still room for a 9V battery if you choose to run it that way. Topside, there’s not much to the Warm Bender. There’s a chicken-head knob for output volume, another for gain, and a third that switches between the NOS 76, NOS 75, and silicon modes. Even the most boneheaded punk could figure this thing out.
A Fuzz Epic in Three Parts
Most Warm Bender customers will find their way to the pedal via MkII lust. If you arrive here by that route you won’t be disappointed. The Warm Bender’s NOS 75 setting delivers all the glam-y, proto-metal, heavy filth you could ask for. It sounded every bit as satisfying as my own favorite MkII clone save for a hint of extra compression that falls well within the bounds of normal vintage fuzz variation. My guess is that when you’re ripping through “Dazed and Confused” you won’t give a hoot.
“There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode.”
If the NOS 75 circuit suffers by comparison to anything, it’s the 2-transistor friend next door, the NOS 76. The lower-gain NOS 76 mode is, to my ears, the most appealing of the three. It’s the most dynamic in terms of touch response and guitar volume attenuation and delivers the clearest clean tones when you use either technique. There’s more color and air in the NOS 76 mode, too. Paired with a neck-position single-coil, it’s an excellent alternative for Hendrix and Eddie Hazel low-gain mellow fuzz that’s more like dirty overdrive. The silicon mode, meanwhile, lives on the modern borderlands of the ’60s-fuzz spectrum. It’s super-aggressive and focused, which can be really useful depending on the setting, but lo-fi, spitty, and weird when starved of voltage via the sag switch. It’s deviant-sounding stuff, but extends the Warm Bender’s performance envelope in useful ways, particularly if you hunt for unique fuzz tones in the studio.
There’s a widely accepted bit of wisdom that says most germanium fuzzes sound lousy unless you turn up everything all the way and use your guitar controls to tailor the tone. This is partly true, especially with a Fuzz Face. But in general, I respectfully disagree and present the Warm Bender as exhibit A in this defense. The gain and volume controls both have considerable range and fascinating shades of fuzz within that can still rise above the din of a raging band.
The Verdict
Some potential customers might balk at the notion of a $199 vintage-style fuzz made in China—no matter how cool it looks. But the Warm Bender looks and feels well made. The sound and tactile sensations in the three circuits are truly different enough to be three individual effects, and $199 for three fuzz pedals is a sweet deal—particularly when consolidated in a stompbox that looks this cool. There is a lot of variation in old Tone Benders, and how these takes on the circuits compare to your idea of true vintage Tone Bender sound will be subjective. But I heard the essence of both the MkI and MkII here very clearly and would have no qualms about using the Warm Bender in a session that called for an extra-authentic mid-’60s fuzz texture.
Walrus Audio’s Monumental Harmonic Stereo Tremolo is far from the only modern tremolo pedal that offers stereo panning. And it’s one of many that digitally approximates the elastic, phasey sound of brown-panel Fender harmonic tremolo. But the Monumental’s economical design and compact dimensions conjure memories of PN-2s I’ve known and missed. It brims with features an old PN-2 user could only dream of in the midst of a stereo amp reverie: the harmonic tremolo, a more traditional optical tremolo-style voice, the ability to blend the two, six wave shape options, and a subdivision switch that enables precise rhythmic variations on any given modulation pattern.
Rhythms Carved in Rock
The Monumental is, as any Walrus-watcher will know, is an evolution of theMonument, which was built around harmonic and optical-inspired tremolo voices, and features tap-tempo, subdivisions, and five waveform types. So, the big news here is the stereo capacity, presets, and the ability to blend the harmonic and optical tremolo types. You’ll pay 60 extra bucks for these extended capabilities. But if you really get into using tr-molo to its fullest potential, these are no small matters.
“The big news here is the stereo capacity, presets, and the ability to blend the harmonic and optical tremolo types.”
The Monumental uses the same-sized enclosure as the Monument V2. The only real drawback from this layout is the proximity of the tap-tempo switch to the bypass, and, as I was reminded at a jam last week, I for one, can easily miss my footswitch target if I’m deeply involved in a musical moment. That issue aside, the Monumental is impressive for the way it accommodates stereo in and out jacks, a tap and expression pedal jack, six knobs for volume, wave shape, stereo pan spread, rate, depth, and the optical/harmonic blend. The subdivision button is situated just below these and is easy to access and operate. None of it, save for the footswitches, feels cramped or difficult to navigate.
Soaring Skyward
It’s good that Walrus added presets to the Monumental, because while it can often seem subtle, the deeper you venture into the possible textures, the more detail and difference you hear among them. Waveforms like the square and sine wave sound great at low- and medium-depth settings. Other options benefit from a more-aggressive depth setting. I tended to like the optical and harmonic tremolo voices in their purest forms, but you can find many intricacies to probe and unravel in the blended settings. Some of those differences might go missing in the wash of a dense arrangement, but when they breathe in more spacious musical settings they are lovely. This is especially true when you use the pedal in stereo.
If you don’t intend to use the Monumental in stereo, you should carefully consider whether the presets and blendable voices merit the extra expenditure. For many, they will. But using the Momumental in mono alone means missing out on some of the pedal’s most infectious sounds. While square, sine, sawtooth, and random waveforms sound particularly exciting here, the other waveform types bubble and percolate all over the stereo field, often sounding percussive in optical mode and woozy in harmonic settings. Maximum depth settings sound particularly immersive. You can also enhance the effects of a dramatic stereo spread by equalizing your two amps differently. I boosted the bass and removed most of the treble from a black-panel Fender and did the inverse with a Vox-style amp for my stereo experiments. The resulting combination of detailed pick attack, strong transients, and peaky top-end popping over a fat, rubbery foundation sounded liquid and surreal—even with the pronounced treble peaks in the mix—making an already basically rich tremolo voice sound extra three-dimensional. By the way, yes, I tried the “How Soon Is Now” riff through a stereo setup. And yep, it sounded fantastic.
The Verdict
At $279, you will want to ask yourself how much tremolo you intend to use before you invest in the Monumental. There are certainly simpler ways to swamp-rock. The Monumental also lives at the more expensive end of its category—coming in a little pricier than pedals like the Keeley Hydra and the crazy-feature-rich EHX Super Pulsar. But there’s no contesting the high quality of this USA-made pedal or the thoughtful way the sounds within were conceived. And studio rats and texture obsessives that love the sensation of swimming in a stereo field may find the Monumental worth every penny.
Walrus Audio Monumental Stereo Harmonic Tap Tremolo - Orange
Unlike the simplest sustain pedals, the Layers enables the player to significantly mutate sustained notes and textures. You can add blends of delay and chorusing that aren’t perceptibly either effect, which creates uncommon-sounding stacks and waves of guitar sound. The Layers pedal takes practice to use with precision, but even partial command of its time-warping capabilities makes it rewarding to use, and it’s relatively easy to dial in chaotic—or fluid and ordered—sustain and harmonizing effects to suit your whims.
Blink Twice If You Understand
Dive straight into Layers without a peek at the quick-start guide and you might fast end up swimming in washes of repeats and harmonic tangles. At first, it might not even be apparent what a layer is supposed to be, particularly because the delay and modulation effects can be so prominent. Essentially a layer is a snapshot of the sound you’re playing as you trigger the effect—either by pressing the soft-relay footswitch or by dynamic picking, depending on where you set the threshold control. (This type of functionality will be familiar to players that use envelope filters.) From there, you can control the length of the layer with the decay control, the wet/dry mix, and the rate at which the layer becomes audible, with the attack knob. By getting a feel for these functions, you can use Layers to predictably create droning and harmonizing accompaniment to what you play. But several additional features enable dramatic alteration of the shape and color of your layers. The “single” button allows switching between a default mode, in which as many as three layers can play concurrently, and another that allows only a single layer at a given time.
A set of secondary functions for each knob are activated by holding down either the single or sub-octave button, which primarily transposes layers down an octave. Options here include the ability to adjust the modulation time, modulation blend, delay time, diffusion (between more or less cavernous ambience), and the amount of dry signal sent to the delay effect, which makes the echoes dirtier and more prominent. The footswitch does triple duty. A single click activates a layer, clicking and holding sustains a layer for as long as you hold the switch, and clicking twice clears layers and puts the pedal in bypass. Functions like dry/wet signal splits, stereo operation, and control via external pedals are also available.Third-Eye Super Vision
The features listed here make the Layers seem more imposing than it is. As I said at the top, you may stare at the pedal a lot to see when the attack threshold is crossed or see which layers have been activated in the multi-layer mode. But the longer you work with Layers, the more you can do by feel. Getting a feel for what rate of swell and decay are right for a given guitar part can change from tune to tune, which makes the absence of presets a slight inconvenience. But it’s not terribly hard to make these adjustments in between tunes or even on the fly, when you’re comfortable. If you elect to go with a single set up and stick with it, you can still add much dynamic control depending on where you set the threshold. Configuring the pedal with a low- to medium-sensitive threshold, three available layers, conservative mix levels, and more generous delay times means you can move between gentle passages where you ride over misty, slow-fading overtone backgrounds or forceful, blown-out ones—all by varying pick intensity. It’s a much more interesting way to build quiet-to-loud dynamics than just switching on, say, an extra drive pedal and reverbs simultaneously. And that flexibility can help you respond to a live performance with extra sensitivity to the mood of a piece. (By the way, it bears mentioning that Layers is often more effective at the start of an effects chain, where it will respond most directly to your input.)
Layers can be subtle. I enjoyed using low mix levels, long decay settings, a permissive threshold, and slow-ramping rise times to create hazy harmonizing trails. I also loved the avalanches of deeply modulating, colliding, and completely unsubtle soundwaves you can slather over a still-coherent melody. Loopers will love building stacks of rising, falling, swelling, and swirling passages of all of these textures that roll like storm clouds. In fact, a two-pedal setup of Layers and a looper will make a simple guitar and amplifier weirder and more otherworldly by orders of magnitude.
The Verdict
The Layers inhabits a sweet middle ground between a simple single-function sustain pedal and overflowing loopers or multi-delays. And though you can utilize very prominent harmonizing voices, it’s generally grainer, less loaded, and more unique than a shimmer reverb. It’s these very uncommon voices and sounds, as well as a capacity for intuitive operation, that make Layers so alluring.
It would have been easy for Wampler to simply make a Mostortion clone and call it a day, but they added some unique twists to the Mofetta pedal. While the original Mostortion had a MOSFET-based op amp, it actually used clipping diodes to create its overdrive. The Mofetta is a fairly accurate replica and includes that circuitry, but also has a toggle switch for texture, which lets you choose between the original-style diode-based clipping in the down position and multi-cascaded MOSFET gain stages in the up position.
Luscious Low Gain and Meaty Mid-Gain
The Mofetta’s control panel is very straightforward and conventional with knobs for bass, mids, treble, level, and gain. The original Mostortion was revered for its low-gain tone and is now popular among Nashville session guitarists. Wampler’s tribute captures that edge-of-breakup vibe perfectly. I enjoyed using the pedal with the gain on the lower side, around 9 o’clock, where I heard and felt slight compression that gave single notes a smooth and silky feel. I particularly enjoyed the tone-thickening the Mofetta lent to my Ernie Ball Music Man Axis Sport’s split-coil sound as I played pop melodies and rootsy, triadic rhythm guitar figures. The Mofetta has expansive headroom, and as a result there’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much. Even turning the gain all the way off yields a pleasing volume bump that would work well in a clean boost setting.
There’s a lot of space in which you can find really bold, cutting tones without muddying the waters too much.
Switching the texture switch up engages the MOSFET section, introducing cascading gain stages that elevate the heat and add flavor the original Mostortion didn’t really offer. Classic rock and early metal are readily available via the MOSFET setting. If you need to stretch out to modern metal sounds, the Mofetta probably isn’t the pedal for you. Again, the original Mostortion was, first and foremost, a low-to-mid-gain affair, so unless you’re using it as a boost with a high-gain amp, the Mofetta is not really a vehicle for extreme sounds.
One of the Mofetta’s real treats is its responsiveness. Even at higher gain settings the Mofetta is very touch sensitive. You can tap into a wide range of dynamic shading just by varying the strength of your pick attack. I enjoyed playing fast, ascending scalar passages, picking with a medium attack then really slamming it hard when I hit a high climactic note, to get the guitar to really scream.
The Verdict
Wampler is a reliably great builder who creates pedals with a purpose. I own two of his pedals, the Dual Fusion and the Pinnacle, and both are really exceptional units. The Mofetta captures the essence of the Mostortion and makes it available at an accessible price. But even if you’ve never heard or played an original Mostortion, you’ll appreciate the truly versatile EQ, touch sensitivity, and the bonus texture switch, which expands the Mofetta’s range into more aggressive spaces. The wealth of dirt boxes on the market today can make a player jaded. But Wampler pushed into a relatively unique, satisfying, and interesting place with the Mofetta.
